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A tractor is the best way to get visitors around the large Davison Orchards, in Vernon, B.C. (David P. Ball / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A tractor pulls a train of visitors through the apple-growing area of the Davison Orchards working farm, which also grows melons, tomatoes, peppers and makes value-added products such as pies. (David P. Ball / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

His green farm machine roars to life and sluggishly begins hauling 10 cars packed with visitors dressed in Canada Day red and white.

The group, a mix of tourists to the dry Okanagan region and locals alike, meander through rows of at least four apple varieties and past a pen of young goats eager for a scratch behind the ear from a child — or better yet, a handful of food.

Roughly 200 kilometres east of Vancouver, the region is Canada’s most productive fruit grower — getting nearly 2,000 hours of sunlight annually and up to 400 millimetres of precipitation despite its desert conditions.

“Our family’s been farming this same (14 hectares) since 1933,” explains Davison Orchards’ co-owner and marketing director Tamra Davison, sitting in the shade beside the now 40-plus-hectare farm’s restaurant where visitors emerge with fresh apple juice ice slush to stave off the sweltering Canada Day heat.

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The Davisons emigrated from England in the 1930s with “no plan,” Davison explained, but were promised free rail passage west, a government policy to increase the settler population there. Disembarking in Calgary, an RCMP officer learned they’d farmed hops.

“Get back on that train and get to B.C. — that’s where all the horticulture is,” he advised. With an $8,000 loan, they bought 14 hectares growing just one apple type; since then, they’ve diversified into many varieties, plus cucumbers, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, melons and “value-added” pies, juices and preserves; eventually they adopted an idea from Eastern Canada and the U.S.: “agri-tourism,” she said.

“We provide jobs for 100 people,” she said proudly, “because we’ve been able to attract all this interest.

“More and more, people are really interested in where their food is grown and how … Canadian farmers don’t get appreciated for providing food not only for local markets but worldwide.”

For Canada’s 150th anniversary, the Davisons offered free farm tours on their tractor-powered-train through their three-generation orchard.

Her 86-year-old mother-in-law, Dora Davison emerges from their bakery, her apron covered in flour, and shows off a Canada 150 quilt she and Tamra made together — having just this year shared her lifelong quilting expertise with her daughter-in-law.

“And our own kids now want to be part of this and come back to work full-time with us,” Tamra said.

Two siblings, festooned in Canada Day T-shirts and red ball caps, squeal as they scramble up a stack of hay bales three high under a small shed. Hearing a rooster crow nearby, they run to it and manage to pet it. Then it follows them, squawking, to the fruit stand where their parents wait. “I pet the rooster,” the young girl boasts.

Up the hill two girls, 8 and 11, put a quarter into a dispenser, each get a handful of brown pellets, and excitedly feed a brown-and-white goat nearby.

“It teaches kids about food and how they grow it,” explained their mother, 34-year-old Carol Martinez, who fled the civil war in El Salvador as a child — another story of migration connected to this farm through an interest in how Canada harvests its food.

“I’m happy to be in Canada,” she said. “I want my kids to know where everything we eat comes from and be grateful.”

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